He is not exactly an insider, but seems broadly aligned/sympathetic/well-connected with the Ilya/researchers faction, his tweet/perspective was a useful proxy into what that split may have felt like internally.
Yeah - I think this is the schism. Sam is clearly a product person, these are AI people. Dev day didn’t meaningfully move the needle on AI, but for people building products it sure did.
The fact that this is a schism is already weird. Why do they care how the company transforms the technology coming from the lab into products? It's what pay their salaries in the end of the day and, as long as they can keep doing their research work, it doesn't affect them. Being resented about a thing like this to the point of calling it a "absolute embarrassment" when it clearly wasn't is childish to say the least.
this is sort of why henry ford left the company he founded before the ford we know, i think around 01902. his investors saw that they had a highly profitable luxury product on their hands and wanted to milk it for all it was worth, much like haynes, perhaps scaling up to build dozens of custom cars per year, like the pullman company but without needing railroads, and eventually moving downmarket from selling to racecar drivers and owners of large companies, to also selling to senior executives and rich car hobbyists, while everyday people continued to use horse-driven buggies. ford, by contrast, had in mind a radically egalitarian future that would reshape the entire industrial system, labor-capital relations, and ultimately every moment of day-to-day life
for better or worse, ford got his wish, and drove haynes out of the automobile business about 20 years later. if he'd agreed to spend day and night agonizing over how to get the custom paint job perfect on the car they were delivering to mr. rockefeller next month, that wouldn't have happened, and if fordism had happened at all, he wouldn't have been part of it. maybe france or japan would be the sole superpower today
> as long as they can keep doing their research work, it doesn't affect them
That’s a big question. Once stuff starts going “commercial” incentives can change fairly quickly.
If you want to do interesting research, but the money wants you to figure out how AI can help sell shoes, well guess which is going to win in the end - the one signing your paycheck.
> Once stuff starts going “commercial” incentives can change fairly quickly.
Not in this field. In AI, whoever has the most intelligent model is the one that is going to dominate the market. No company can afford not investing heavily in research.
Thinking you can develop AGI - if such a thing actually can exist - in an academic vacuum, and not by having your AI rubber meet the road through a plethora of real world
business use cases strikes me as extreme hubris.
Or the obvious point that if you're not interested in business use cases then where are you going to get the money for the increasingly exorbitant training costs.
Cheaper, faster and longer context window would be enough of an advancement for me. But then we also had the Assistant API that makes our lives as AI devs much easier.
Seriously, the longer context window is absolutely amazing for opening up new use-cases. If anything, this shows how disconnected the board is from its user base.
I think you are missing the point, this is offered for perspective, not as a “take”.
I find this tweet insightful because it offered a perspective that I (and it seems like you also) don’t have which is helpful in comprehending the situation.
As a developer, I am not particularly invested nor excited by the announcements but I thought they were fine. I think things may be a bit overhyped but I also enjoyed their products for what they are as a consumer and subscriber.
With that said, to me, from the outside, things seemed to be going fine, maybe even great, over there. So while I understand the words in the reporting (“it’s a disagreement in direction”), I think I lack the perspective to actually understand what that entails, and I thought this was an insightful viewpoint to fill in the perspectives that I didn’t have.
The way this was handled still felt iffy to me but with the perspective I can at least imagine what may have drove people to want to take such drastic actions in the first place.
I was underwhelmed, but I got -20 upvotes on Reddit for pointing it out. Yes products are cool, but I'm not following OpenAI for another App Store, I'm following it for AGI. They should be directing all resources to that. As Sam said himself: once it is there, it will pay for itself. Settling to products around GPT-4 just passes the message that the curve has stagnated and we aren't getting more impressive capabilities. Which is saddening.
> He is not exactly an insider, but seems broadly aligned/sympathetic/well-connected with the Ilya/researchers faction, his tweet/perspective was a useful proxy into what that split may have felt like internally.